Gance is still taking the whole matter very seriously, and it’s not that he can’t do something on the screen that is amazing. The first half of the second J’Accuse is essential viewing. The second half comes close to helpless self-parody. But, of course, it ends with the big finish reprised: with the dead walking and warning the France of 1937. The film was actually dedicated “to the war dead of tomorrow, who will doubtless look at it skeptically, without recognizing themselves in its images.”
At those words, the silliness of the project falls away. Gance was a fabulist and a self-romancer (he could as easily be Napoleon as a Christ of the Trenches). But he believed, and when he is flowing he is a torrent and an immense filmmaker. J’Accuse is history (the real thing), a document of its times in which the last images—of the soldiers rising from the dead—wipe the smile off the face of any winning side.
Jaws (1975)
By the time it was over, the shooting schedule and the budget on Jaws had doubled. Seven million dollars for no major stars and a rubber shark. By now, you likely know the film inside out, and you know it well enough to be sure that many individual passages still work, still bite, despite familiarity. And rubber. So be assured: On the eve of opening some people reckoned it was a disaster at which audiences would soon be laughing. Never happened. Instead, they jumped. Initial rentals were over $120 million. The movies were changed, again. And again it could happen tomorrow.
There was a novel, by Peter Benchley, based on a four-page outline delivered in 1971, with an advance of $7,500. But the Bantam paperback bid on the book was $575,000. People don’t go to the beach in summer to be terrified. They want to be entertained. But suppose one fits the other?
Richard Zanuck and David Brown bought the screen rights for $150,000, and they got Benchley to do the screenplay with Carl Gottlieb. As a director, they had in mind Steven Spielberg, twenty-seven in 1974, who had just made The Sugarland Express for them, a small, offbeat picture with a modest audience. But they had seen Duel, Spielberg’s TV film where a truck chased a man, and no one laughed.
There would be three brave men who went after the shark, and the casting was Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss—the local cop; a veteran seaman; a marine biologist. The shark was ready to eat them all and it started with a beautiful girl (Susan Backlinie) who goes midnight skinny-dipping on a Cape Cod–ish beach and gets the biggest sexual surprise of the 1970s.
The shooting was a nightmare—photography by Bill Butler, camera operator Michael Chapman—and truth to tell, a lot of the film looks scrappy and scruffy. It didn’t matter because the balance of action scenes and calm was exact and because when the action came Spielberg’s concept and the editing (by Verna Fields) were decisive. Then they put the John Williams music on it, with that infernal theme signaling the shark itself.
The guys are terrific, and when Robert Shaw delivers the long speech about the Indianapolis (which he may have written—John Milius, too), then we are in a comic-book Moby Dick that could not be bettered. The climax is everything required. The audience is cheering when it is not moaning with terror. And it means nothing at all—not even the half-baked social criticism of the resort town that would rather not frighten tourists away. It is zero to the power often.
And that model became the basis for the new cinema of the young as people like Lew Wasserman (in charge at Universal) realized that kids would come back time and again to see such thrills. In time, the computer would be the new gas in the thrill-making. But popular cinema was back. The young demographic was in charge. And the bright days of the early 1970s were shutting down.
La Jetée (1962)
I feel cursed, or end-gamed, sometimes in that this book is a survey of fiction films. As a result, I have had to omit several pictures which seem to me close to the core appeal of all cinema—films like Humphrey Jennings’s Fires Were Started; Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog; some of the works of Marcel Ophüls. But I found a little comfort in that I could, honorably, include one film from Chris Marker, who is the grand master of the essay film. For his 29-minute movie from 1962, La Jetée, is a story. Indeed, it may be our perfect commentary on the special way in which photographic images work with time to make the explosive equation of moving film.
Marker’s picture is placed sometime after the end of the Third World War. The surfaces of the earth are hopelessly contaminated from the war. But some survivors exist in the underground galleries beneath Chaillot in Paris. It is like science fiction, isn’t it? And this small community has a plan or a hope to escape the ruined earth, though the only possible journey will be by way of time. One man is selected because he has an especially intense memory—and this threatened culture believes in (it clings to) the intensity of memory. You see, it’s like a great romance.
He remembers this: “Orly. Sunday. Parents used to take their children there to watch the departing planes. On this particular Sunday, the child whose story we are telling was bound to remember the frozen sun, the setting at the end of the jetty, and a woman’s face.”
He is not clear what happened, but he knows he saw a death there. In twenty-nine minutes, Marker tells this story—of the man’s training and journey—through the medium of still, black-and-white pictures, which he took himself. The man practices immersion in memory, as if it were sleep, and fragments of that other time begin to cohere. But only as stills, the bits and pieces of culture—the relics, the fragments, the remains. In other words, by being still, they cannot overcome the resemblance to death, to stillness. These pictures are still-lifes but that is dead nature.
And then, for a flicker or so (you must keep awake, no matter how tempting dreaming is), you have to see this. As I say, for a flickering, and you know what I mean by a flickering—like the flutter of a match coming alive—we are looking at the young woman and she is alive, existing in time and duration. Time passes through her like the sky through our eyes. She is living, pulsing, watching us. Then it goes.
I will not tell you the rest of the story, but if you love these stories where the film moves, and if you see La Jetée, you will know what I mean and why I include it here. For breathing duration is life itself, and at the end of the nineteenth century we identified it, we could use it, we trapped it. It may even be the case that we started to destroy it. No, La Jetée is not a comedy—though the young woman looks at us as if she expects an amusing remark.
Jet Pilot (1957)
A book like this occasionally sails within sight of a fair, friendly shore where “cinema” may be a sensible medicine passing into the collective body of society as sweetly as orange juice. Then a mist comes up, a contrary wind, and we are all at sea again. In other words, do not discount madness as an essential condition of movie, the thing that binds the hopes of filmmakers and the dreams of the audience. Take Jet Pilot, not a good film, but unavoidable in its proud air of folly.
A monument and a monstre sacré of the 1930s, Josef von Sternberg had been “resting.” Since the insouciant delirium of The Shanghai Gesture (1941), he had done a 12-minute documentary, The Town, he had been seen on the troubled sets of Duel in the Sun, and he had taught at the University of Southern California.
Then he was approached by Howard Hughes to make Jet Pilot, a sort of Ninotchka in the air, with John Wayne as an American flying ace trying to tame Janet Leigh as a Soviet pilot. Sternberg was prepared to accept because Jules Furthman was already hired as writer and producer—and Furthman had been screenwriter on Shanghai Express and Blonde Venus.
Let Sternberg say what happened next: “A little stumbling block became evident at the very outset. I was first asked to make a test—not of an actor or an actress this time, but to prove that I could still direct. Having devoted most of this book [I am quoting from Fun in a Chinese Laundry] to the problem of directing a film and its etiology, it would be out of place to mention that doubts about my ability to direct are not shared by the author of this work. One does not lose a skill that has been mastered. Not wishing to make my tale
nt a subject for controversy, I thought it advisable to consider the curious proposal a test of my temper rather than a test of ability, and therefore offered no objection, not even bothering to observe that directing a film was not the same as climbing a tall steeple.”
Sternberg goes on to claim that he directed a sixth of the film in two days on his test—though in black and white, not the color intended for the final version. This was 1951 at RKO, where Winton Hoch did a great deal of the photography, and John and Janet did their honest best, while Howard Hughes, presumably, meant to make an anti-Communist, pro-flying film.
Sternberg was not even fired. But after the wrap, Furthman did a lot of rewriting and redirecting. The film was not released properly until 1957, and it is wildly silly, beautifully unbelievable, and immensely entertaining—especially if you begin to wonder what Wayne and Leigh were saying between takes. Yes, it does suggest that mastery had slipped. But be careful. Mastery means being in charge. In 1953, with far less means, Sternberg made Anatahan, which is not just a masterpiece, but—as he might have said—worthy of him.
Jezebel (1938)
As he drew closer to having Gone With the Wind as a finished picture, David O. Selznick took a very condescending attitude toward Warners and their Jezebel. He chose to believe that it had been a venture taken on to spite him, especially after Selznick had declined the package deal of Errol Flynn and Bette Davis for Rhett and Scarlett and gone with Clark Gable, some money, and Loew’s distribution instead. Selznick even offered to do a quick edit on the Warners picture to save them embarrassment. In fact, Warners had had Jezebel—a play by Owen Davis—since 1935, or before Selznick had ever heard of Margaret Mitchell.
Not that there aren’t always resemblances beneath the fevered skin of melodrama. Julie Marsden is an ambitious self-centered demon, and Southern, just like Scarlett O’Hara (Northern women are seldom as languid and serpentine). The word bitch is easily employed to describe the pair of them—and with the same mixture of disapproval and delight. But there were those at Warners who advised against doing Jezebel just because they did not see how Julie could be made sympathetic. In time, the script—pushed along by John Huston—did introduce a change in her. Her selfishness yields and is replaced by self-sacrifice. But it’s all melodrama and nobody really argued with Bette Davis in her estimate that Scarlett O’Hara was made for her. So Davis got her compensation with Julie Marsden, one of whose big moments is appearing at a black-and-white ball in a scarlet dress (though in a black-and-white film).
William Wyler was borrowed from Goldwyn to direct, and he trusted the screenplay that Huston had produced. Ernest Haller did the photography and Max Steiner the music (exactly the team that would do Gone With the Wind). Wyler infuriated the studio by his endless retakes, and there were stories that he was imposing this routine on male lead Henry Fonda because both Wyler and Fonda had been married to and divorced from Margaret Sullavan—of course, Sullavan herself could have played Jezebel (or Scarlett).
This brings to mind the notion that by the late 1930s, the bitch type was gaining in popularity—as if women had grown weary of their own demureness onscreen. Gone With the Wind and Jezebel (Southern epics in successive years) established the screen vitality of the woman as ruthless romantic go-getter. And the Best Picture in the following year—Rebecca—is further proof. For the dead Rebecca, the bitch, is so much more powerful than the “I” character played by Joan Fontaine.
Wyler went nearly four weeks over schedule. But the picture came in at a tidy 103 minutes, and nobody really complained about the lack of color. Davis won her second Oscar. Fay Bainter won a supporting Oscar. And both Henry Fonda and George Brent did reliable jobs as the men in Julie’s life. The cast also included Donald Crisp, Spring Byington, Henry O’Neill, and Richard Cromwell. In being a big hit, Jezebel seemed to make it less likely still that Gone With the Wind could flourish with similar material.
JFK (1991)
For those old enough to remember November 22, 1963 (and the next killing, on Dallas police premises, two days later), it’s not that any of us were ever complacent about the Warren Report. It was an inadequate mess; it was hurried; it was pressured by the need for political stability and reassurance. And it became gasoline to paranoia. But it needed a lot more than Jim Garrison to make the argument. There are fine, searching books on what happened—and there was even a second official examination (the Stokes report) that concluded that there probably was some kind of conspiracy—or more than just Lee Harvey Oswald meaning mischief that day in Texas.
And so we come to Oliver Stone’s JFK and its pride of place in a lamentable line of American films made with extraordinary skill and panache, but so carried away by that power of film as to ignore the forces of logic, argument, and responsibility. It’s not just that JFK is earnest, sincere, and crackers. It is that film is no way for a sane society to come to terms with such issues. Historically, it’s very hard to see that JFK shifted the lassitude of a bored, ignorant nation. Above all, it leaves a fatal gap between the dogged whine of Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison and the flagrant over-emotionalism of Oliver Stone. Watching this film is painfully close to watching a decent man go crazy.
And after you’ve dealt with the director’s cut (205 minutes as opposed to 188) and after you’ve gone through JFK: The Book of the Film, it’s still hard to resist the feeling that Stone’s doubts about what happened stem from his hurt feeling that President Kennedy would not have allowed the Vietnam War to swell and persist. Whereas the evidence on both sides of that issue is balanced, and Stone’s fecund paranoia over political motivation can hardly trust the good sense or moral rigor of any individual. What thrives in this film, after all, is the feeling for everyone’s instability—for the suggestiveness of possibility. And that is no attitude for judge or jury.
That said, there are amazing virtues: The script by Stone and Zachary Sklar is immensely ingenious at cramming in all the detail along with its banal storyline; the editing by Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia is delirious, and a sign of new editing fluency that had come with video editing. Robert Richardson’s photography is beautiful and corrupted at the same time, riveting and yet seeming to dissolve in front of our eyes; and the film is full of smart performances (as well as some that are terribly overdone)—I’d note Kevin Bacon, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, Joe Pesci, and Donald Sutherland (all to the good); and Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Ed Asner, all too much, with Costner and Sissy Spacek clinging to a very tenuous central story.
It’s a disastrous film by a talented and concerned man, and a terrible warning of film’s limits and its helpless weakness for melodrama once those limits are ignored.
Johnny Guitar (1954)
It’s very difficult to approach Johnny Guitar as the result of any kind of sensible process. Far more acceptable is the thought that in concept it was fanciful enough to be camp—not an honest story, but one of the first deliberate, or helpless, exploitations of the collected clichés of movie and moviemaking. Yet I’m not sure that Nicholas Ray, or anyone, really deserves credit for that breakthrough. Far more likely is the explanation that this wayward project got into such a mess that it came out looking as if it had been made by the surrealist movement of the 1920s, or S. J. Perelman after a hard season with the Marx Brothers. We rejoice in Johnny Guitar, and we may speculate forever on what happened. But don’t lose sight of this moral: that by 1954, even, the movies had sniffed the chance of giving up the ghost.
There are far more stories about the film than there is story in it. According to Philip Yordan, its credited screenwriter, none other than Lew Wasserman was to blame for it. Joan Crawford was his client. Nick Ray was his friend—more to the point, Ray was the good friend of his wife, Edie Wasserman. So Wasserman persuaded Republic to do a Joan Crawford Western, based on the script that Roy Chanslor had written from his own novel. It was only when the unit had moved to Arizona that Wasserman called Yordan and asked if he would go down there to rescue a disaster. Crawford apparently h
ad said the script was such shit she would walk off. In the aftermath, as the film became notorious, several hands took credit for salvaging ideas. But it was probably Yordan who elected to make Crawford the “male” role, to pose Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge as bitches in heat, and to overplay everything whenever in doubt.
I have heard Ray scholars and enthusiasts claim that the love story is “poetic” and from Ray’s heart. I think such talk is nonsense and damaging. The one thing I don’t doubt is that Ray determined to shoot the film as if in a fever, instituting a savage color contrast, and turning small moments into set pieces. Of course, he may really have had a fever—or been drunk. But thanks to Trucolor and Harry Stradling there is a demented symbolism to the color scheme and an overall feeling that lipstick is made of blood.
In the same way, the mishmash of real location exteriors and a very mannered art direction in interiors (by Hal Pereira and Henry Bumstead) is genuinely exciting—like garish color photographs touched up with expressionist gesture. In all of this, Crawford plays everything three or four inches beyond the hilt, and struts around—in black riding clothes or a white wedding dress—like a lost cake ornament. Sterling Hayden has a languid air that seems to say, or hope, that all this will pass, and Mercedes McCambridge has smelled the chance of being the craziest person in the whole goddamn picture. The supporting cast includes Ernest Borgnine, Scott Brady, Ben Cooper, Royal Dano, Ward Bond, Frank Ferguson, and John Carradine.
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